A Review of Tweets Regarding the Metaverse in Turkey: A Social Network Analysis

Metaverse was used as a term for the first time in the novel Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992) and, having evolved over the years, has ceased being a fiction and come to offer people alternative digital universes similar to the real world. While information about the fields of activity of the metaverse spreads among people through social media shares, the literature on this subject also sees communication networks called social networks being formed. Effective actors in these networks are able to direct the flow of information in the network. The main purpose of the study is to question how and for what purposes the metaverse has spread among people in Turkey by periodically comparing the social networks related to the metaverse, how these social networks are shaped, how effective actors direct the network. For this purpose, a total of 745,784 Turkish posts with the "#metaverse " tag on Twitter were retrieved through a full archive scanning using R-language functions. Social network and sentiment analyses were applied to the posts that went through data and text mining processes. With a full archive scan, all posts containing the relevant tag can be retrieved from Twitter without time constraints. The results show that people are interested in economic investment activities in metaverse universes under the guidance of influential actors in the network. However, as the posts about economic investments increased periodically, the positive attitudes of the general audience decrease while the rate of neutral and negative tendencies in the posts increase.